SURVITEC CONTINUES TO TRANSFORM MARITIME SAFETY, WHILE ALSO UNDERGOING SOME INTERNAL TRANSFORMATIONS.
Moving with the Current
PROJECT MANAGED BY:
ROBERT SMITH
Survitec has spent over a century ensuring the safety of people working at sea, with a brand built on the twin pillars of reliability and innovation. When we spoke with Survitec last year, they were rolling out a new innovation to the world, Seahaven, the world’s largest inflatable lifeboat. Seahaven is revolutionary, overturning more than a century of received wisdom about maritime safety by replacing rigid lifeboats with rapidly deployable inflatable solutions that could evacuate as many as 1,060 passengers in only two lifeboats. The system was already promising when we talked with Robert Kledal, Survitec’s CEO, in 2024. In the year since, the project has already come a long way.
We have progressed well, to the point where we have now passed all the approvals necessary for a change to 100 years of cruise ship safety infrastructure,” Kledal tells us. “We are now in real negotiations with key cruise lines and shipyards. We do not have an actual assigned PO yet, but we are closer than we have ever been. I’m encouraged by our recent developments on that.”
But while Seahaven’s progress is exciting, it is far from the only thing that Survitec have had going on this year. The firm has been making some major investments in its production capacity in the USA, positioning the company to serve an influx of new contracts for its Aerospace and Defence division.
“The USA is a big buyer, and the political environment is such that more and more countries want products produced inside their own borders,” Kledal explains. “Creating production capacity was a good move for us, and we have benefited from that. Managing the supply chain that way has enabled excellent growth.”
The USA is not the only focal point for Survitec’s growth strategy, however. Survitec has also been looking at the Qatar LNG Project, which has set out substantial LNG production ambitions for the next two decades.
“We have won key contracts in connection with that, validating our approach to fire safety,” Kledal says. “We have also made
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Robert Kledal, CEO of Survitec.
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an acquisition in Norway that will enhance our capacity to handle fire inspection, servicing and maintenance in Scandinavia. That means we now have a triple capacity compared to what we had before, and integration has been going pretty well.”
As well as building its capacity and global footprint, Survitec has also been launching a new strategy internally – one that will set the course for its marine business.
“We call it our Vista Strategy for the Marine and Wearables business and a separate strategy for the aerospace and defence business, ‘Heading 2-0-3-0’,” Kledal says. “We are refreshing our culture and engagement by defining a new set of values. We have spent time discussing and aligning our culture to these values, deciding the way we want to do things going forward.”
DEMANDING SUPPLY
As well as growth and achievements, Survitec has also encountered a number of challenges over the last year. As
in most businesses, Survitec’s success can hinge on getting the right raw material to the right place at the right time.
“We are still working on our customer journey, making the transaction with the customer as seamless as possible,” Kledal tells us.
These challenges are all the more relevant given the everchanging environment Survitec is doing business in.
“I still think our overall management of our supply chain needs to improve,” Kledal reflects. “The world is becoming an increasingly complex place as tariffs and logistics bottlenecks start to appear. Because we produce for different markets around the world, moving a lot of product internationally that needs to be on time and in full. Some of it is about processes, some of it is about having the right facilities, and some of it is in our underlying IT systems.”
At the same time, Survitec is coming out of the other side of a period of high inflation that hit the company hard last in 2022
and 2023. One area where substantial improvements have been made has been in the company’s refinement of dynamic pricing, to ensure customers are charged consistently while allowing the company to maintain a profit margin.
“Pricing was taking good people out of their day job, so instead of adding it to their day job, we have expended effort on developing algorithmic pricing,” Kledal says. “We constantly fine tune it.”
While the algorithmic pricing helps, Kledal is under no illusions that it can replace the knowledge of his own customer service staff.
“We have been testing it in pilot locations, and that has meant overcoming scepticism from people who think they know better than an algorithm,” he tells us. “It is about getting down to that granular datapoint level. It turns out that in 20% of cases the person does know better than the algorithm, but in 80% the algorithm knows better. So, we work that into the process. That means a change in how we manage pricing, but we have developed the tools, and we aim to roll it out globally.”
TAKING FLIGHT
Talking to Kledal it is clear that once again Survitec is doing a lot of exciting work, but it is not
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until the end of our interview that Kledal reveals perhaps the biggest change happening at the company.
“We are selling our Aerospace and Defence division,” Kledal announces. “That will enable our shareholders to take back some of their investment and deleverage our balance sheet by paying back loans and further accelerate our investments and R&D in the Marine Division.”
The decision allows Survitec to capitalise on the improved performance of the Aerospace and Defence division in a market that is much more receptive to looking at defence businesses.
“We have developed a great team and a great division,” Kledal says. “This is an opportunity for buyers to own an aerospace and defence business when the sector has
been better than it has for many years.”
For Survitec, it is also an opportunity to refocus on its marine business through the Vista Strategy. That will be particularly important as the company reorganises its manufacturing footprint to meet the needs of the current global environment.
“The world is a dynamic place, and we have to make sure we make the right bets in terms of where we have our manufacturing capability and capacity,” he says. “While we are keeping our design and compliance capabilities centrally, we need to ensure our actual manufacturing footprint gives us
flexibility and some redundancy to handle tariffs and other geopolitical surprises.
This strategy will be a key focus for the company. Survitec’s history is one of growth by acquisition, and so Kledal sees lots of room for improvement in creating a unified and seamless service across its locations.
“We are going to continue our journey on pricing, improve the customer journey and make interactions even more seamless than they are today,” Kledal concludes. “It’s the same ship, the same crew, and the same safety questions they want answered. We need to be uniform across our global service stations in how we do that.”
“WE ARE GOING TO CONTINUE OUR JOURNEY ON PRICING, IMPROVE THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY AND MAKE INTERACTIONS EVEN MORE SEAMLESS THAN THEY ARE TODAY.”
